


the five phases of taking advantage of a professor’s public meltdown

by fiveyaaas



Series: under mistletoe [11]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Crack Treated Seriously, Divorce, Drinking, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Mutual Pining, POV Outsider, Post-Divorce, Pseudo-Incest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:29:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28051695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyaaas/pseuds/fiveyaaas
Summary: Dr. Hargreeves was known by many of his students and all of his reviews on ratemyprofessors.com to be somewhat… eccentric. This had only worsened when his wife, Dolores, cheated on him and ran away with a woman, which, good for her, but it happened right as Helen was put in his class. All she needed to graduate on time was this one class, which is the only reason she had ultimately decided, sobbing in the advising office, to take it.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Series: under mistletoe [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2036878
Comments: 19
Kudos: 66
Collections: Harcest Ficmas 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chevalier_Barthelemy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chevalier_Barthelemy/gifts).



**Hargreeves, Five**

**To: Cho, Helen +47 others**

**Tue 9/18/2018 8:54 PM**

phsycis clas, hello. i am durnk curehtly, sorr. anywas wife cheatis on me and no class toreowro 

byee

* * *

Dr. Hargreeves was known by many of his students and _all_ of his reviews on ratemyprofessors.com to be somewhat… eccentric. This had only worsened when his wife, Dolores, cheated on him and ran away with a woman, which, good for her, but it happened right as Helen was put in his class. All she needed to graduate on time was this _one_ class, which is the only reason she had ultimately decided, sobbing in the advising office, to take it. 

Currently, she’s sitting in front of him, during his allotted office hours. His eyes are bloodshot, either from tears or the Starbucks cup that he’d not-so-subtly spiked thirty minutes ago. 

“You know the thing about love, Helen?” He’s clearly attempting to not slur his words, and he’s not entirely successful. 

Helen raises her eyebrows at Dr. Hargreeves, already going through the five stages of grief. 

“It’s bullshit!” he announces, chugging the coffee down before slamming the cup down without grace. 

“Uh, Dr. Hargreeves, maybe I should lea-“

“Sure, leave. Everybody else…” Dr. Hargreeves trails off, looking directly behind Helen with an expression akin to a blind person that was miraculously suddenly capable of seeing. 

Helen turns around, knowing that she would see this guy’s wife that had just had an affair. 

The woman stomps forward, clutching a thermos in one hand and a tote bag in the other. “Five Hargreeves, if I smell alcohol on your breath, _at all,_ I swear to you that I will lock you up at _Almost There_ like we did with Klaus.”

“That is a shady name for a rehab and you _know_ it.”

She purses her lips upon seeing Helen watching them warily, leaning down to whisper harshly but unsuccessful at masking her next words because of her frustration, “You told me that you’d stay home if you were drinking.”

Helen’s professor makes no effort at masking his own as he’s, of course, entirely inebriated. “Vanyaaa,” he whines.

_Vanya?_

Unable to help himself, Helen asks, “Is this not your wife?”

The woman, Vanya, snorts. _“Please.”_

She has her back turned on Dr. Hargreeves, so she clearly does not see the way he winces at her disbelief. 

“I should go,” Helen says. 

“You brought me soup?” the professor asks, reaching for the thermos. “You’re the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me, and I love you.”

“Okay, Five, eat the soup.” She turns to Helen. “He’s had a rough time since he’s been going through this divorce-”

“I don’t want to get divorce! She wants it, despite the fact that it was _her_ who cheated on _me._ With a lady, Vanya! How was I supposed to know she liked women? I find out that somebody has been sleeping with her for _years-”_

“Five, Dolores likes everyone. Subsequently, _most_ people have slept with her for years.”

Dr. Hargreeves gasps in betrayal, “You _didn’t.”_

“I didn’t know she was your fiancée at the time!”

“You thought I just brought her along to a family dinner for what? Fun family bonding time?” 

“Wait,” Helen interrupts, realizing something. “Are you two… _siblings?”_

“Stay out of this,” Five snaps.

“Five, you’re my best friend, I really don’t want to see you like this any longer.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want my wife to cheat on me. _Especially_ with you.” 

Helen decides that they’re just best friends, mentally heaving a sigh. Her plan, to pass this class, might actually work in that case.

Because clearly, this woman is the ticket to _acing_ this class when this man is so clearly in love with her. He may not know it, and she _definitely_ doesn’t know it. However, if Helen played her cards right, she’d use their precarious situation to her advantage.

* * *

**Hargreeves, Five**

**To: Cho, Helen +47 others**

**Mon 9/25/2018 10:54 AM**

Love is a funny thing, isn’t it? You think you know somebody, but then they sleep with your best friend and run off with some woman from their hot yoga class that they kept telling you, _‘Oh, Five! It means nothing! We’re just friends!’_ Just friends, my ass, Dolores. We all know you fucked your assistant on our marital bed! 

Also, please remember to check Pearson for your most recent test grades. Vanya told me I had to grade on a curve, or she’d throw me in rehab at this shady ass place. She also told me that she’d take away my phone if I actually sent this email, but she can’t catch me if I run away fast enough. I’m not, like, super drunk, so feel free to email back if you’re not satisfied with your test grades.

* * *

Helen’s plan has already started to come to fruition. All she’d had to do was tell Vanya that she had some concerns about Five, and she’d scribbled down her number.

Pretty soon, they’d be on their way to dating. And _then,_ Helen would make an A. Which she is now shooting for as she is playing matchmaker and feels that that’s only fair.

Vanya gets lunch with Helen daily, holding a stack of baked goods that she always dutifully takes to Five’s office. She watches them from afar, seeing them joke. Sometimes, Vanya will sit down on his lap, which Helen fails to see how both of them interpret the action platonically, but she’s not one to judge. Too harshly, at least. 

Though, really, how do they _not_ know they’re in a relationship? Clearly, they both have feelings for one another, and, clearly, they care about one another a lot for Helen to have assumed they were married in the first place. 

She starts going to Professor Hargreeves’s office hours after a couple weeks of emails he sent the class in a variety of ambiguously inebriated states, pretending to pay attention when he explains the assignments before innocently asking if his friend, Vanya, is okay. Likely, if the man were in his right mind, he would have noticed that she is using his feelings for his best friend to get a higher score in his class, but, as it is, he just starts rambling on and on about Vanya each time. 

Phase one of her plan complete, Helen accepts that she will actually be able to graduate on time. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve had this update ready for a bit, but... I didn’t have the energy to post it. 👀 Anyways, this fic will be updated again at some point, but I can’t tell you when that will be. I’ve been struggling for a bit to actually post my WIP updates, and I’m going to post a few in a row for that reason.

Helen pretends to listen to Dr. Hargreeves rant about Vanya, checking her phone as he starts talking about her bitch boyfriend, completely in his own world. From the state of his breath, Helen doesn’t think he will ever notice that she has barely gotten in a word in the past half hour, and she also doesn’t think that he will notice if she asks him to give her a hundred on her most recent test, especially if she suggests that Vanya had come up with the plan.

“He’s a  _ bitch,  _ you know?” Dr. Hargreeves repeats, likely for the twelfth time in the past seven minutes. “I think she should break up with him, and I’m going to fight him.”

“You’re going to fight him?” As much as she did  _ not  _ want to engage with this conversation, she also didn’t think seeing her professor be arrested would be beneficial to her. For one thing, it would mean that she’d actually have to work for her grade (not that talking to this man wasn’t work in of itself), and, for another, she’d promised his best friend that she would look out for him. Helen had something of a soft spot for the woman, considering she would have to have award-winning patience to regularly interact with this man. “I don’t think Vanya would be supportive of that.”

“What Vanya doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

“I actually heard that it  _ would  _ hurt her if you tried to hurt her bitch boyfriend.”

He makes a small, horrified noise. “Well, I can’t have that. Side note, but I have to get more coffee.”

Helen frowns at him, handing him a thermos that was part bourbon and part coffee. The exact percentages of alcohol to coffee were not important, but she figures she’s certainly not helping Vanya keep him from rehab, which she feels a  _ little  _ guilty for. When Dr. Hargreeves takes a swig, he nods in appreciation, “You are a good kid, Heleanor.”

“That’s… not what Helen is short for.”

“Agree to disagree.” He gulps the rest of the thermos down, setting it down in front of him. “I’m going to make you a deal.  _ If  _ you don’t let Vanya know that I’m drinking at my job, which, by the way, how are you guys friends?

“Focus, Dr. Hargreeves.”

“Right,” he blinks blearily. “Okay, if you don’t tell Vanya that I’m drinking, I will give you the A.”

_ “What?”  _ There is no acting when she asks this, genuinely stunned that he has managed to figure out what she is doing, especially considering she wasn’t even sure that he knew what  _ he  _ was doing at any given moment. 

“Listen, kid, I’m going to father Vanya’s children one day—”

“Oh, lord.”

“And I’m going to have to learn how to bargain with kids, which I’ll be honest with you, I think I’m going to have to get sober, Helen. For little Number Twelve.”

“What now?”

“Seven plus Five, Helen.”

“That means… _ nothing  _ to me.”

Dr. Hargreeves rolls his eyes. “Alright, do you agree not to tell my Vanya that I’m drinking?”

“Sure.”

“And do you agree to keep bringing your special coffee?”

She sighs, not wanting to have to spend money on alcohol. It had cost nearly ten dollars to get him drunk now, and that was from the shady ass bargain bourbon she’d gotten at the liquor store, figuring that this man would not be able to tell at the state of inebriation he was always in at office hours. “Think of little Number Twelve, Dr. Hargreeves.”

“Oh, fuck, you’re right. Okay, you have the A.”

“You’re going to give me an A that easily?”

“No.” He seems to realize something. “You were planning to  _ Parent Trap  _ us, correct?”

“Why does everybody always use  _ Parent Trap  _ for every matchmaking scenario? You’re not my parents.”

“Heleanor, I’ve got an important offer. Focus.”

Helen frowns. “Alright, what’s your offer?”

“I need you to get Vanya and I together still. The A is yours if you can get Vanya and I romantically involved.”

Though she is certain he could probably lose his job for this, she is starting to think that this guy doesn’t really care about his job at all. “Alright, I can do that.” All she has to do is get this loser a date, and she’ll be fine. Plus, she doesn’t have to deal with the stupid fucking Pearson website, which is the worst thing that she has ever interacted with in her entire life. “But all I can guarantee is a date.”

“That works for me.” He frowns at the empty thermos. “So, Leonard—”

“The bitch?”

“Yes, the bitch! I hate that bitch.”

“I am genuinely curious about something, Dr. Hargreeves.”

“What’s that, Heleanor?”

She leans forward in her seat.  _ “How  _ have you not lost your position at this place yet?”

He shrugs. “I mean, I have a Nobel Prize in Physics and I teach like maybe three classes a year.”

_ “How  _ did I land in your class, then?” What an awful turn of fate. Though she can’t say that she’s ever quite had as easy of an A as this, especially in one of her worse subjects. It’s not quite fair that she  _ has  _ to take this class to graduate, anyways. 

Dr. Hargreeves doesn’t answer her question, searching around his desk for more liquor. 

A thought occurs to her that Vanya will likely find him like this, and he’ll spill all of this to her. 

“Oh my god,” she mutters to herself, horrified at the realization she has had, what she will have to do to get this man to not tattle on her. “Dr. Hargreeves, I have more to drink.” She hands him a water bottle, filled with ice water. “It’s just straight vodka.”

He gulps it down. “This is not that strong. What brand is it?”

Texting Vanya quickly and telling her that her best friend has gotten a little drunk and that he’s just saying a bunch of nonsense, thus ensuring that his offer would be known only to them (assuming he would still remember it sober, to be fair), she tells him, “It’s this new brand that gets you even  _ more  _ drunk because you can’t taste the liquor.”

Dr. Hargreeves keeps drinking gulps of water until he sleepily lays his head against his desk, only waking up when Vanya gets there, his eyes lighting up entirely as he lays his head against her chest instead. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!!!!💕


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God, this fic is now over halfway done, but I’m _obsessed_ with the Helen roasting fic and I’ll be sad to say goodbye to it for sure. 😭

“I’m worried about him,” Vanya announces, while they eat lunch, glancing around quickly. Her eyes have dark circles underneath them, and her hair appears to have not been brushed in weeks. With how much of a mess this woman appears to be, Helen would almost say that both Vanya and Dr. Hargreeves seem to be soulmates. Of course, if she ever voiced that thought, both Dr. Hargreeves and Vanya would start pestering her even more than they already did. “Do you think that I should be this worried? He seems to be doing better, I suppose, but that makes me think he’s hiding something.”

Helen, because she is trying to get an A in Dr. Hargreeves’s (only achievable as of this point if she gets him a date with this woman), tells her, “I think that he has seemed to be doing  _ tremendously  _ better, in office hours alone.”

This is true. In a sense. Though he had gotten more obnoxious in his speeches about his intentions to marry Vanya and father her children in the past few weeks, he had  _ not  _ gotten drunk in that time, either. Now, to be fair, it is entirely possible that he is only  _ not _ drinking because Helen constantly reminds him that his imaginary child, Number Twelve (she still has yet to find out _what_ that name is supposed to mean), needs his father not to drink. 

Though Helen does not, in any way, care whether or not Dr. Hargreeves is drinking, she knows that his sobriety is  _ instrumental  _ in her getting them together. Primarily because Vanya regularly talks about how she intends to lock Dr. Hargreeves up at  _ Almost There,  _ which sounded to Helen like the shadiest rehab to have ever existed. Helen had initially dismissed Dr. Hargreeves on that, but she has to admit that his assessment of the name did hold  _ some  _ validity. 

Not that she will ever tell him that. 

The longer she watches over him, calculating her next moves in the Dr. Hargreeves and Vanya relationship plot, she begins to sympathize with the man. 

It has to be some highly specific form of Stockholm Syndrome. There is absolutely  _ no  _ way that she could start agreeing with that man, who regularly makes Helen question if she should even be pushing someone as kind as Vanya towards his direction. 

Ultimately, it always came down to the fact that Helen cared about her grades and future career  _ much  _ more than Vanya. Besides, anyone with  _ any _ common sense would know that Dr. Hargreeves wasn’t the type of person one should end up with. 

Vanya whispers, “You really think that he’s doing better?” 

Saying this woman has any common sense might be being a little too generous, though. 

“Of course he is. You know, just the other day he said that he’d like to one day have kids, and he’d want to be completely sober before then.”

“Wow,” Vanya breathes. “Do you think he meant it?”

“I definitely think that he meant he would be having kids, yes.”

“That’s so great…” Vanya glances down, face crumpling a little. “Good for him.”

“You know, now that he’s single…” Helen pretends to be hesitant with her next words, like she’s mentally berating herself for having said them out loud. In truth, this is an  _ essential _ portion to her plan. “No, no, I shouldn’t…”

“Say it,” Vanya insists, leaning forward, nearly falling over by reaching the edge of her seat. Helen wonders idly if the woman is always this stupid or if she just has recieved an affinity for stupidity in all interactions with Dr. Hargreeves. Some sort of mating ritual that involved getting on the man’s level. “I mean, if you want to. You don’t  _ have  _ to, of course. There’s no pressure.”

“He’s just mentioned that… Well, he’s mentioned that he’s  _ interested  _ in dating again.”

Tucking strands of hair behind her ears like she is a doting schoolgirl and not,  _ at the very least,  _ in her late twenties, Vanya asks, “What do you mean?”

“Listen, you didn’t hear it from me, but I definitely think that man is on the prowl. And, based on who he just divorced, I would be willing to be that his type is women that double as the human representation of a trainwrecks”

Vanya blinks, eyes going far away, seemingly unaware that Helen is shaming her. “You really think that he’s looking to date again?”

“I bet he’d even be willing to date  _ you.”  _ God, she cannot believe that she is actually having to spell this out for the woman. Helen hopes for her sake that she hasn’t always been this much of a moron. Though, to be fair, even though her best friend is a world-renowned physicist, he appears to be  _ just  _ as much of an idiot as her. A match made in Heaven. Or Hell. Who knows? “The thing is, you’d never know until you tried.”

The woman ponders this, tasting the words on her tongue, “I would never know until I tried.”

“Right. Correct.” At this point, Helen wonders if she has taken things too far, if maybe she should have just accepted a C and moved on. What grade could  _ possibly  _ be worth the psychological torment that she is currently going through? 

“We’d be a match made in  _ Helen.”  _ Vanya looks very proud of herself with her joke. “Get it? Like—”

No grade is worth  _ this.  _ None whatsoever. “Yeah, I got it.”

Eyes going serious, Vanya asks, “Do you really think that he would go for me?”

If they both have managed to irritate Helen more than she even thought possible, she has no doubts that they are meant to be. Then again, the very coupling of them might cause the apocalypse, in that everybody on the planet praying for their own imminent death would certainly get at least  _ one  _ higher power to sympathize with humanity and just end it all. “I certainly think that you two are _meant_ for one another.”

“You’ve convinced me,” Vanya tells her, a certainty in her voice that makes Helen regret all of the sins she has committed thus far. “I’m going to ask him out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!💕

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading💕💕💕💕


End file.
